No, they did not.

The 2nd edition of the Cambridge History of Warfare (2020) is unfortunately pretty much the same as the 1st edition (2005), and as such, it reflects a previous generation of scholarship. Specifically, the expert who contributed the chapter on Greek warfare is Victor Davis Hanson, who was a leading scholar in that field in the 1990s, but whose views have been subject to sustained and comprehensive criticism ever since. I have written many posts on this sub and also did a podcast episode about the problems with Hanson's work and the older scholarly tradition he represents.

The notion you're asking about here - that Greeks before the Persian Wars settled whole wars in brief stretches of intense violence between hoplites - is the core of Hanson's work. It is not completely groundless, of course; Hanson could never have convinced anyone if he'd made it all up. But there are important reasons why we can still say with considerable confidence that he was wrong.

 

The kernel of truth

What Hanson is getting at is that the wars of Greek states in the Archaic period were necessarily simple. Everyone accepts this; Greek states of this early time were small, poor, and primitive compared to the powerful states of the Near East. They did not have the revenues to afford standing armies or the organisation and coercive power to grow into expansionist empires. Instead, their armies consisted of self-equipped and self-supplied citizen militia, raised for a particular campaign and disbanded as soon as that campaign was completed.

This basic system allowed the Greeks to raise large armies at minimal cost, but these armies couldn't be kept in the field for any length of time. Ordinary people had to return to their ordinary lives or the harvest wouldn't get done and people would starve. This meant that Greek states were unable to commit to long campaigns or sieges. Most of them could only afford to muster an army during a few months of summer, in between major phases of the agricultural cycle.

This extreme limitation to the availability of armed force meant that decisions had to be forced quickly or not at all. Barring the occasional storming of a city, the enemy had to be confronted in the field if anything was to be accomplished. In other words, there were structural reasons why many campaigns might end in a pitched battle, after which both sides would return home and end the fighting for the time being. (It should be noted that even more campaigns likely would have ended with nothing but a bit of ravaging and plundering.)

All Hanson needed to complete his vision of a warfare shaped entirely by pitched battles between farmer-hoplites was the claim, made by a Persian in Herodotos' Histories, that the Greeks always seek pitched battle on flat ground when they fight each other. Armed with that claim, Hanson could argue that these hoplite battles were the only way the Greeks knew how to fight. At first sight, it seems both plausible and confirmed by the passage in Herodotos.

 

The reasons for doubt

Let's start with that claim in Herodotos. To put it bluntly, it is a lie.^1 This is clear from the context: the one making the claim is consistently portrayed as a liar and a fool, and in this particular instance he is trying to trick Xerxes into thinking the conquest of Greece will be easy. Herodotos probably never meant for anyone to believe him. He is portraying the Greeks as savage and stupid. We are supposed to see this as a transparent bit of slander, for which the speaker would eventually pay with his life (he was killed in battle against the Spartans at Plataia). That means we cannot see this claim as a fair generalisation.

And of course the Greeks understood how to wage war by other means than pitched battle. There are many examples of surprise attacks and ambushes as well as assaults on cities - all of which could result in the sort of quick and decisive outcomes that suited militia armies.^2 Pitched battle was just one possible solution to the problem that the troops would have to go home again soon - and probably not the preferred one, because it was extremely risky. Everyone wanted victory, but no one wanted to lose a huge number of their own citizens.^3

At the same time, while a lot of campaigns may have ended with a single battle, it is much harder to prove that those battles decided wars. Sure, the troops had to go home after a few weeks in the field - but they were ready to go again the following year. At this low frequency, conflicts between states could drag on for generations. After the Persian Wars, as soon as some Greek states built up some revenue streams of their own, the frequency of their campaigning increased; armies might be sent out several times during the spring-summer season, or even be paid a wage to march out in winter in the hopes of gaining some strategic advantage. Decisive battles were rare.

In terms of equipment, Hanson assumed that the farmers who formed the militia armies of Greek states were all more or less uniformly armed. In his view they were a socio-economic class of small farmers, who each had just enough to afford hoplite armour for himself (but not more). Therefore, if the farmers were doing the fighting, this must have meant that all the fighters were hoplites. The fact that the fighting was often done over farmland also neatly unites the warriors and the stakes of war. It all fits together in his model. But we now know this was not true; in the Archaic period, only the elite could afford hoplite armour, and the mass of the population would have fought as lightly equipped infantry, mixing in with the hoplites. By the later Archaic period, as Greece grew wealthier and more people could afford hoplite armour, the rich differentiated themselves by fighting as cavalry while specialist light-armed units (archers, javelin troops) soon made their appearance. Greek warfare was never an exclusive affair of hoplites (even if the sources, with their extreme elite bias, sometimes give this impression).

Finally, the duration of pitched battles (when they occurred) is simply not known. To suit his theory about what hoplite fighting looked like (which is a separate question), Hanson supposed they must be over quickly, because the warriors would quickly become exhausted. But we have no clear evidence. The sources often say battles went on "for a long time", but we don't know how long is a long time. The only thing we really know is that the pursuit of the defeated side would often go on until nightfall, but that doesn't tell us very much about how long the actual fighting went on.

In short, while Hanson's theory is not entirely groundless when we look at the basic conditions of early Greek warfare, it fundamentally misunderstands or even totally ignores much of the evidence. The actual picture was much more complex, and, needless to say, much less rosy.

 

Sauce

1. R. Konijnendijk, 'Mardonius' senseless Greeks', Classical Quarterly 66 (2016) 1-12

2. P. Krentz, 'Deception in Archaic and Classical Greek warfare' in H. van Wees (ed.) War and Violence in Ancient Greece (2000); M. Seaman, 'Early Greek siege warfare' in L.L. Brice (ed.) New Approaches to Greek and Roman Warfare (2020).

3. R. Konijnendijk, 'Playing dice for the polis', TAPA 151 (2021) 1-33

See also generally H. van Wees, Greek Warfare: Myths and Realities (2004).